“Power to the Neighborhoods!”: New York City Growth Politics, Neighborhood Liberalism, and the Origins of the Modern Housing Crisis

“The shaping of the style of our lives is removed from us.”10 But despite the perilous state of city life, the solution was, to Mailer, equally clear: “Power to the neighborhoods!” This was to be the watch-cry of his mayoralty—a near-complete devolution of municipal government up to and including the police, schools, and fire department. [...] In an age of depersonalization and anonymity, liberalism would promote solidarity at the smallest scales of the city: the family, the home, the block, and the neighborhood. [...] Through changes to the New York City charter, most notably the formalization of the powers of the city’s community boards, neighborhood activism redesigned city government and helped hasten the end of the machine era of New York politics. [...] 20 overruled the following month, however, by two higher-level government bodies empowered to make decisions regarding land use: first, the City Planning Commission and, then, the Board of Estimate, an eight-person body whose members included the mayor, the city comptroller, the city council president, and the presidents of the city’s five boroughs.54 As a result of the concessions made in the com. [...] But they underscored how the effort to make the community boards serve as a wrench in the works of the growth machine took place informally, in the realm of politics, as well as formally, in the realm of law.91 The charter reforms may have created the structure of decentralized city planning, but the community boards’ evolution into the vanguard of the anti-growth machine was a result of neighborh.